PGP, an encryption suite maintained by Network Associates, will no longer be sold, and the company will not be selling support services and contracts either. Network Associates bought PGP in 1997 for US$35 million, dismantled most of it (keeping the IPSEC utility, firewall, and SDK), and tried to put the rest up for sale. No one wanted to buy the remains of the technology, which amounted to refuse according to critics of the plan.

PGP maintains that there was just simply not enough demand for the product in the corporate setting, and many individual users were downloading the software for free. NAI has integrated the firewall and VPN pieces of the encryption suite into its enterprise products, and those products will become the newly marketed offering. NAI'S critics state that the company had an anti-marketing strategy regarding the PGP software (it never really made an attempt to sell the product), and that if it had wanted to make money from the product it certainly could have. For the future, only existing support contracts will be serviced to their conclusion–they will not be renewed, and no new ones will be written.

Phil Zimmermann, creater of the PGP software, states that there are many other companies using different implementations of the PGP source code, and urged NAI to release the code so that a Berkeley-style license could be created. He stated that the free version is no longer available for download, there's no support for Mac OS X or Windows XP (the software won't run on them), and that a slick GUI needed to be created to bring the free versions up to the polished level of the PGP equivalents. He was also dismayed that NAI had OS X- and XP-compatible versions ready but would not ship them. He called for a large corporate sponsor to support development of the open PGP platform.

RON'S OPINION
The sad truth about this story is that since Network Associates bought the PGP software it can do whatever it wants with the technology, including kill it. It doesn't have to release the source code, ship the OS X- and XP-compatible versions, or renew its support contracts, something NA has said already will not happen. I don't like it, and neither does Phil Zimmermann, but NA didn't ask us.

Network Associates probably had significant monetary reasons to kill support for the PGP software, and probably had good reason to keep pieces of the technology in-house to create some of their own products, which could be more profitable for the company in the long run. I hope NA releases the source code, and I hope XP and OS X versions of the software can be developed, but I don't think it will happen.

It's sad to see such good software be thrown onto the trash heap, as it was developed as a good way of encrypting e-mails and the like, and it was made available as freeware. Obviously, this is one we will have to keep track of, as it could have a significant impact on the tech community.

6 months ago today was the 9-11 terrorist attacks on WTC. And this PGP software is what is believed to be used by the terrorists to communicate safely with each other. - by RyGuy

GNUpgp(9:45am EST Mon Mar 11 2002)There is still gpg which is GNU's open source version. Is probably more secure than pgp (no nasty backdoors to recover your lost key, yeh, that's what it's for)

It's mostly irrelivent anyway as most people don't use encryption. I talk to people I know about using it and they just roll their eyes. “I don't need it.” They say. - by Neil Watson

Then again…(9:54am EST Mon Mar 11 2002)They also used telephones, computers, airplanes, etc. Zimmermann was very distraught over the use of PGP by the terrorists. But it is now known that the government had all the information they needed about a terrorist plot before the act in spite of the encyrption. What they did not have was the means to analyze that raw data and act on it in a timely fashion.

Encryption is an extremely important piece of software. Surely, the open source community has people with the knowledge to create it…?

.- by Monitor

PGP and terrorism(10:43am EST Mon Mar 11 2002)Zimmermann shouldn't feel so upset that the 9/11 terrorists might've used his software. Encryption is widely available outside the borders of the U.S., so if PGP hadn't been available the terrorists would've used something else. You can't stop people from encrypting things by passing laws. The Internet does not obey national laws in any country except the country that passes those laws — as it should be. The idiotic restrictions on exportable encryption have only served to stunt the U.S. encryption market while foreign software companies can do whatever they want (and they do).

Am I sad that the terrorists used PGP to coordinate communications to attack us? Perhaps not so much sad as angry, but I'm not stupid enough to blame PGP or Zimmerman. He shouldn't blame himself, and no one else should as well. He created a tool. Any tool can be abused, and (I believe) anything that can be abused eventually WILL be abused. Ergo, we can't ban EVERYTHING because it MIGHT be abused, so we should just shut up and deal with the abusers, not the tools. - by U.S. Marine

I hope(10:47am EST Mon Mar 11 2002)I hope everyone didn't misunderstand me. I was not blaming Zimmerman or his product. I was simply stating something I had read a while ago. - by RyGuy

PGP in a post 9/11 world(11:30am EST Mon Mar 11 2002)Sadly, I would guess that NAI is simply covering their corporate a$$es. I can see that producing and selling this type of technology could be construed by the vastly uninformed U.S. Congress as aiding and abetting terrorism. Therefore, NAI cut the strings to avoid possible prosecution under the new U.S. laws governing this issue.

Anyone surprized? Not me, in fact expect more of this type of reaction as time moves forward. Not fair, but when the hell is reality ever truly fair?

And by the way, the terrorist could also have used the Navaho language to encrypt their messages, so do we ban that too???

Re: Navajo(1:21pm EST Mon Mar 11 2002)Oops, sorry for the misspelling. What I was referring to was the U.S. military use of the Navajo language as an unbreakable code during WWII. Since only a handfull of people knew it, and it was the only language at the time that was NOT based upon Latin, it was unbreakable.

(I thought my spelling of the name looked a bit weird, but chalk it up to Monday morning eyes…)

- by The Watcher

Clients will Survive(2:00pm EST Mon Mar 11 2002)PgP has made its way through the internet well enough that it will live on as gPg and other versions regardless of who owns the original source. The time has come for independent support of PgP. The question is: Is the government to blaim for the rise and fall of PgP? Maybe Microsoft should consider using more (convert to) PgP. Then again, maybe our government needs to allow terrorists to wash ashore with PgP. Was the idea six months late? - by jbjur

PGP WILL run on XP(9:13pm EST Mon Mar 11 2002)I'm running NAI PGP Desktop Security 7.04 (their latest version, I think) on WinXP Pro right now. You just have to disable the VPN/firewall option when you're installing. I forgot that the first time I installed and it killed my internet connection. Fortunately XP had the ability to revert to how it was before I screwed it up. But it works great, methinks. Never tried the PGP disk option, because I'm using Bestcrypt for that. Ah, so many cool toys… - by Mark

I really like PGPDISK an PGPNET(2:15pm EST Tue Mar 12 2002)I really like PGP Disk… good thing I have my copy… and I paid for it too! that's not common. - by MeMo